COMBING THE BRAIN by DF Lewis and Stuart Hughes
Published RAZOR BLADES 1998
A voice came over the tannoy into the the yard. Thom was staring down at his pacing feet, wondering what earthly good could come from following his own tail in this way. They called it exercise. He called it combing the brain.
The voice was too echoey to be made out clearly, although Thom knew that it wasn't exactly summoning all the prisoners to an evening of fun and games in the mess. The mess was really that: a lumber room where the effects of dead inmates had been "temporarily" stowed. Although there was a small TV. A necessity these days, a TV. Even for people like Thom. But no comfy chairs.
The prisoners were supposed to maintain a monkish demeanour, as they trooped around the yard. But the lockmen seemed to have disappeared into their staff-hut, for a huddle ... or a rumble.
Old Pat hissed between what teeth he had left: "Oi, Oi, did you know, they're letting us free. It's an am-nest-ee!"
Thom was more surprised that Old Pat knew a word like that than about the news itself. But he was even more taken aback by the washing-line of a grin that Old Pat had now managed to stretch between his ears with dirty brown underwear seeming to hang from it.
"But I'm not a-going," Old Pat continued, "for that'll make me piss prison-sick. This has been home from home for me." He spoke with a mongrel slur. “This is my home.”
The exercise yard was big, rectangular in shape, about ninety yards on its longer sides and seventy on the others. The outer wall on the west side had a guardtower at both ends. The guards up there were armed with binoculars, stunguns and heavy laser riot guns. When they’re up there, Thom thought, because they were conspicuous by their absence now, and the guardtower had never been deserted before. Never. In the six-and-a-half years Thom had been incarcerated here, the guardtower had never been abandoned.
It didn’t make sense.
Unless there really was going to be an amnesty.
Thom walked towards Old Pat. Already he could see most of the other inmates - there were probably one hundred and twenty cons in the exercise yard now - trooping towards the thick stone wall full of tiny slit windows on the north side. The Cellblocks were on the other side of that wall, and the showers, and the mess hall.
Old Pat made out that he was eighty-eight years of age, but he wasn’t that old. Somewhere round about seventy-four would be more accurate. But he did look eighty-eight. His hair had been falling out for the last couple of years and what little remained was as white as snow. His face was a mass of deeply ingrained wrinkles, and he was losing his nicotine-stained teeth. Rheumatism and arthritis had got their hooks into him too. Even seventy-four was old though, too old to be locked up in this shithole, and despite his age, Old Pat was sharp. He liked to talk slow and deliberate and make out he was going senile, but that was all a show - Old Pat was as sharp as any con inside here, maybe the sharpest.
You had to get close to Old Pat first though, before he told you anything useful at all. It had taken Thom four-and-a-half years to gain Old Pat’s confidence and he had always found him a reliable source of information ... but this, this seemed too far-fetched even for Old Pat.
Thom grabbed Old Pat’s collar, and tugged gently, tilting the old guy’s head upwards. He stared into those watery, green eyes and felt a pang of sympathy for this old man, who had lived in this prison shithole for the better part of fifty-five years.
“Am-nest-ee, huh?” Thom spoke slow and deliberately, just as old Pat had, emphasising each syllable back to the old man for effect.
Old Pat nodded.
“Where did you hear this, old man?”
“Susie.”
The voice cracked between the separate syllables of the name.
Thom knew that Susie was the daughter who had died while Pat was in prison. For heaven’s sake, Pat had mentioned her more than enough over the years, hadn’t he?
It had been part of Thom’s confidence-gaining technique, encouraging Old Pat to hold forth about his deceased daughter. Even pretending, along with Old Pat himself, that she was still alive - yes, at least somewhere was she alive. The one definite fact was that Old Pat had never been able, not only to dwell on the circumstances of Susie’s death itself , but also to admit she had died at all. But Thom knew full well that Susie had inadvertently been killed by a terrorist bomb, the planting of which bomb Pat himself had managed to mastermind from within the prison walls. The hamfisted repercussions, if nothing else, had been in the papers. A matter of record.
“Susie?”
Thom’s own voice cracked. For fuck’s sake, he had lived with this ghost of Old Pat’s daughter long enough, Thom had even begun to fall in love with her!
There was a sudden siren. The sound of guns rattled round the prison. Thom had seen sufficient videos in the mess hall to visualise the scene. As within a computer game, Thom trolled through the corridors - in his mind’s eye, at least - zapping guards. A bonus point for each one splattered. Thom was not a stable man. After all, why was he in prison himself? Thom was the first to admit that he should have been put away for life. He had committed crimes - again, perhaps, in his mind’s eye, which was bad enough - against all ages and all sexes.
Now there was this strange amnesty.
Am-nest-ee, as Old Pat had put it.
What could the authorities be thinking of?
The siren sounded like an Allied submarine sinking, after letting off its missiles at a basking German U-boat. Old Pat had been a war hero. But now what the hell was he? A shithead who’d thrown bombs at his erstwhile allies. Or tantamount to throwing. And all for the sake of religion.
But, still, it was Pat’s religion that had managed to resurrect sweet sweet Susie.
Strange, with him being so sharp, that Old Pat could believe in far-fetched things - things too far-fetched for popular TV drama series about the paranormal.
Thom was an expert on TV. He had suffered little else for yonks in the unfurnished Mess..
Senility had at last caught up with Old Pat, perhaps. So, Thom abandoned him to a renewed washing-line of skid-marked gabble. Indeed, having now forgotten his own mention of Susie, Old Pat indulged in endlesss words about the complex network of escape-tunnels that, he seemed to recall, once undermined German Concentration Camps. Makeshift sewers, all of them, Thom thought.
The exercise yard was as good as deserted. Only Thom and Old Pat, and the last few stragglers who were trooping their way towards the north block.
He glanced back over his shoulder. Old Pat was on his knees now, clawing at the gravelly floor with his bare hands.
“Hey, Pat!” Thom called.
“Not much longer,” Old Pat slurred. “Soon be over. Soon.”
Thom shook his head, in fact, headed towards the east block, seeking another prisoner who was currently sick and hauled up in the prison infirmary. At least, Blue may be able to shed some light on the day’s events.
He entered the east block and turned left, heading towards the infirmary. The east block was grey, even when the sun shone through the barred windows. There were lots of long halls and long corridors on the way to the infirmary. Thom walked through them all, the heels of his prison shoes clocking on the polished floors, but he never saw a soul. Not a lockman nor a con, and that was strange.
Even stranger was the fact that the workshop was silent and deserted as Thom clocked past. Every cell block had a different schedule for exercise. Thom and Old Pat were in Block F and their time to exercise was three-thirty. While one cell block were rooting and tooting and combing the fucking brain, the rest would be doing the hard graft.
Should be doing the hard graft.
Am-nest-ee, huh? Thom thought as he clocked down the long corridor that led to the infirmary. Not very likely.
“Hey, Blue!” he called out, pushing open the infirmary door, clocking inside.
He got no answer.
Something was wrong.
The infirmary had ten beds, five on each side of the wide aisle. Three of the beds were occupied, but there was no sign that any of the patients were awake.
“Hey!” he called again, clocking slowly down the aisle. Blue’s bed was the third on the left. He stepped over an abandoned mop and bucket and approached Blue’s bed.
He noticed the blood at once. The coarse linen sheet was soaked in it. The sheet had been pulled over Blue’s head.
Thom stepped closer and reached out with two shaking hands. He grabbed the sheet and folded it back.
Blue was dead. One word had been scrawled across his forehead in blood.
One, solitary, word:
SUSIE.
But the blood was not simply laid on the surface. There was no element of tracery. As if a chisel had applied it - rather than, say, a finger. The crimson was thick, welling along gutters of flesh, perhaps having even been gouged deep into Blue’s skullbone. The pain met Thom’s own pain head-on. Blue had been his mate. More than a mate, really.
The implication had not yet time to work itself to the centre of Thom’s comprehension. The very sight of Blue’s disfigured corpse - and there were other changes in addition to the engraved forehead - had allowed to escape the very significance of which word the engraver had chosen.
But there it was.
SUSIE.
All in Upper Case.
If it had been in joined-up writing, the crimson would have oozed the whole width of the word, from letter to letter...
Thom had never been good at joined-up writing at school. He’d never been permitted to branch out beyond mere printing. A small tousle-headed kid, with grimy cheek applied to the desk so that he was looking at the page of the exercise book side-on, short stub of a pencil gripped clumsily in his fist, as he painstakingly scored deeply each separate letter with no discrimination between upper and lower cases...
s u s I e
She was the girl who had sat behind him all those decades in the past. The one with the pigtail. Only a coincidence, of course. The name was a common one, even in its diminutive form. At that relatively young age, the particular girl called Susie from Thom’s junior school -
(i l u v U S u s I e)
- had begun tits. It was always something he remembered.
Nothing to do with Old Pat’s Susie, though. She was a different poke altogether.
He gently pulled the sheet back over Blue’s head. The silence was uncanny for a busy prison. As if the computer game within which Thom was participating had lost its bite.
He looked across - with no obvious volition - at one of the opposite beds ... and there was the white face of Old Pat: a ghost of his former self, having followed Thom and crawled between the empty covers. Despair was in the old man’s eyes. And NIL BY MOUTH was printed above the bed’s headboard, presumably because the previous patient had been pre-operative.
But they don’t do operations in prison infirmaries, do they?
Infirmaries in institutions like this are only meant for flu or tummy trouble or, at the most, drug overdoses. Perhaps, at a push, the sometimes serious after-effects of weird sex.
Flesh could never be under the surgeon’s knife in this place, in what was after all nothing more than a cottage hospital.
“Hey, Pat!” Thom said. “What’s going down?”
Thom walked across the aisle and Old Pat sat up in the bed, hugging the previous occupants’ sheets around his own shoulders. Thom stepped closer and noticed that the filth on the sheets was in fact blood. Dried blood.
“Pat,” he asked. “What do you know?”
Old Pat grinned, and hung his dirty washing line of stained teeth out to dry again. His watery, green eyes lost some of their despair and sparkled vaguely as they always did when Old Pat held knowledge. The old man was, amongst other things, the wickedest card shark inside this shithole. The old man was a nightmare to get to know, but once you did know him - as Thom believed he did - then Old Pat would never be able to bluff you at poker again. Bluff everybody else, mind; but not you. Not Thom.
“You know what’s going down here, don’t you, old man?”
Old Pat shook his head.
“Go on, old man, tell me.”
Old Pat’s mouth flapped open and then his head exploded, disintegrating into a thousand bloody pieces of flesh and bone, gristle and brain. Something wet and slimy splattered Thom’s face.
Thom dived for cover behind the bed where Old Pat’s headless body still sat. There was no time to think. The way Old Pat’s grinning head had imploded ... could mean only one thing.
A heavy laser rifle.
And Thom was next in line. Then -
A m n E S T
- his brain seemed to budge in its own nest. A mulchy mess of me.
I am my own brain, he thought. He held his head as he felt the slow-motion shock take root. Someone had locked on - having painstakingly aimed the heavy-duty weapon through a poky spy-hole on the other side of a pixel screen.
When death came suddenly, it was more like a process of disease slowly working through the body towards the core of self ... a process that was squashed together - like a magic trick - into a split second.
Thom’s thoughts now followed a pattern that was no longer under his control. It was as if someone - or something - had escaped the prison of his mind and was masquerading as Thom because an essential part of the real Thom was subject to its wayward mentality. It was both Thom and not-Thom, but the not-Thom bit took the immoral high ground, becoming a host to a parasite that had once been Thom.
Thom Thom Thom
Old Pat old man Old Pat old man Old O l D o L D O l d
Ever old.
The word old could not be shaken off. The world could not be shaken off.
History was old. The Irish problem was old. Irresolvable. Irredeemable. Irreducible.
Men even had bombs in their head............
The last vision was the prison lit up into a concentration camp mock-up. Towering laser beacons crisscrossed the sky as well as the exercise yard. There was no need for sirens because the wailing agony from the infirmary stitched the aether, serving purpose of both alarm and special-effects backdrop.
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